


once bitten, twice fucked

by TobermorianSass



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cock Warming, Cunnilingus, D/s undertones, Dubious Consent, Dubiously Consensual Blow Jobs, Emotional Telepathy, Force Parasites, Multi, Non-Consensual Feelings, POV Multiple, Pegging, Porn with Feelings, Soulmates, That's Not How The Force Works, Threesome - F/M/M, Vaginal Fingering, come shots, force induced fuckery, force induced mind meld, more like feelings porn tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 17:54:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16123715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: Rose never meant to end up with her Force-parasite bonded to Hux and his stupid parasite when she bit him aboard The Supremacy. But the Force is a little shit and sometimes, Finn knows, you need to take matters into your own hands to make the best of a kriffing terrible job.





	once bitten, twice fucked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caracalliope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caracalliope/gifts).



> Happy Birthday pal, I hope you enjoy this thing.
> 
> Also shoutout to EssayOfThoughts for betaing this and renaissance and SecondStarOnTheLeft for plot unfucking help. Thank you so much guys.
> 
> The title of this fic is a play on Ian Hunter's [Once Bitten Twice Shy](https://youtu.be/NKgQO6sILug) which was one of many inspirational pieces that contributed to this.

Sometimes the Force is a little shit. A kriffing bastard, playing at acts of cosmic irony. Which is to say, of  _all_ the viruses and parasites in the galaxy and  _all_ the Force-born wounds in the world, it’s her luck she ended up with this one crawled up inside her.

Doesn’t mean, however, she can’t play it against itself every now and then. Or try to. Or run away.

It’s dark by the time they land planetside on Myrkr for their rendezvous with Hux. Her wrist is pricking almost painfully where the parasite, or whatever the hell it is — General Organa tells her it's all a sub-type of Force wound, but it's too implausible to believe a wound like that would settle under her skin and besides wounds don't call to other wounds, or make you feel someone else's feelings - connects the two of them. Anticipation, fear, excitement: kriff, this guy has way more emotions than a guy who goes around looking like he's got a tauntaun tail up his ass should have.

Rose forces them away as she turns away from the viewscreen and follows Finn out the freighter.

It’s cool outside, with the moon hanging high up in the sky, dotted by hundreds of stars in unusual configurations from the ones she remembers from lying in their observatory with Paige. The moonlight is more than enough to pick their way through the undergrowth. It throws long shadows: trees, vines, the leaves moving in mesmerizing, distorting patterns on the ground in the gentle night breeze. On Hays Minor, they only had the wispily looming blue-brown sphere of Hays Major on their horizon and she’d often wondered if on Hays Major, they’d look up into the night sky and think of Hays Minor as their moon. A sister planet, but small and bright, like a moon, pulling the tides and turning everything just that little bit unreal and beautiful.

She sneaks a glance at Finn. It’s getting to be a bad habit now, always looking at him for a hint of what he’s thinking. Sometimes, just to look. Like now, with the moonlight breaking sharply on his cheekbones and leaving behind dark, long hollows in his cheeks. Her stomach twists. Yeah it’s because they’ve been running on four hours of sleep and less, running — a general miasma of running, just to stay afloat — but the effect is striking.

And of all the people in the galaxy to end up tied to, it wasn’t the one man she wanted to kiss.

“You okay?” He turns and looks at her, concerned.

The way he looks at her, all of her, every inch of his attention laser-focused on her. It’s not right for someone to look like that — that much attention could kill a battle-hardened rancor if it was turned on it. And kriff knows, it’s not just her anymore, it’s the stupid Force, the stupid parasite that’s feeding on her nervous system. They’ve sneaked kisses in the past and whatever in nine hells is stuck inside her body doesn’t like it. She lands up with a migraine and it isn’t his fault, not when her stomach twists and every hair on her stands on end when he puts his hands on her waist and pulls her close and kisses her long and slow.

“Yeah, it’s just —”

He looks at down at her right arm. “That bad, huh.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

She walks away briskly, but that’s the thing about Finn. He cares. Too much. Kriff, she’d bask in it any other time but it  _hurts_ now, like rubbing salt into a scraped knee.

“Isn’t there anything you can do about it?”

Rose shakes her head. “They don’t even know how it works. Not even General Organa.”

(“In theory,” General Organa had said, looking down at the dark lines, tracing the pattern of the starbird on her inner wrist. “But it’s the truth mixed with wild bantha-tales and it’s impossible to tell which is which now.”

And she didn’t say it, but the look in her eyes said everything else:  _and no one followed the trail when the zolamut plague was first reported on in the furthest corners of the galaxy_.

Like home, where they first appeared when the third wave of First Order recruiters came by and she was ten and all they had was hearsay about what these creatures did, besides disrupting Hays Minor's sparse ecosystem.)

“Can he —”

“Yeah,” she says. “You know when we — a week ago —”

Finn nods, saving her the explanation.

“I don’t know what it is,” she continues, “but it hurt. Not — not you. You were great, everything was great. But this?”

She waves her right hand.

“I’ve never had a headache like that,” she tells him. “Like someone was skewering my eyes with heated needles —”

“I understand,” Finn says, a little too quick.

Rose can’t help grinning at him, a little. Kriff knows why they wanted him to be a soldier. He’s not made for war, not in the least.

“It’s getting worse,” she says flatly.

“And it happens every time we —”

She digs her hands into her pockets uncomfortably. “Yeah.”

“So it doesn’t like us together,” he says thoughtfully. “And it gets worse when you’re closer. So maybe what it is —”

“Finn —”

“So maybe what it is is that — thing — wants you to —”

_Fuck him_. Like she hasn’t thought about it already, collecting another holochip from Hux while he stares down at her with that frightening, hungry expression in his eyes.

She squeezes his arm gently. “Please don’t.”

Or Hux, drawing away from her in disappointment, last time. Her mistake. For one wild moment she’d thought, maybe it wouldn’t be half bad and maybe it would feed the parasite enough to slow it down — right up until he was kissing her. Gently, uncertainly — fine, it was fine and she couldn’t stop thinking about Finn and how he wasn’t Finn at all, till the sudden sharp, shooting pain drove through her skull like a spike.

She really should know better than to let her hopes get up when Finn says: “we’ll find a way around it.”

“You really think so?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” Finn says confidently. He puts an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close. A mild  pain blooms at the back of her head. “We’ll find a way out of it and it’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

* * *

 Finn sidles up to Hux later, while Poe and Rose pore over the schematics in search of hidden traps and cryptographical spyware the First Order might have thrown in. He ought to go down and help, but they’ve got it handled between them both and  _someone_ has to solve this problem. All that First Order training about problem solving has to be good for something: cut to the chase where possible, in case of further intractability, cut to the blaster.

“So,” he says, aiming for casual. “You look awful.”

Hux turns sharply. “What?”

“You know.” Finn gestures vaguely at his face. Kriff, the guy looks like he’s ill. If Finn didn’t know any better he’d think the parasite was eating Hux inside out and not just transmitting every single one of Rose’s feelings to him across the galaxy.

“Haven’t been sleeping well, huh?” he soldiers on, despite Hux’s glare.

“None of your business.”

“Rose hasn’t either.”

Hux goes stiff all over, like an enraged tooka-cat. “I fail to see why  _that_ should bother me.”

“Come on.” Finn grins and pointedly looks at Hux’s right sleeve. “I know all about that thing. Can’t be nice, having a hyperspace lane straight into someone else’s emotions.”

Guy’s fists ball up, but he concedes: “It’s not convenient.”

Encouraged, Finn sidles up closer. “I’ve been thinking —”

“Above your paygrade, isn’t it, FN-2187?”

“Finn,” he says firmly. “Sleemo. I’m trying to help you out here. She’s suffering, you’re suffering  _and_ wandering around looking like a mooncalf in season —”

“Impertinent —”

“I’ve seen the way you look at her,” he says. “You care.”

Hux turns on him, face dark with impotent rage. “Shut up.”

“Or maybe you don’t,” he says. “Maybe you’re just a selfish bastard who’d be happy to take without asking if you knew you could get away with it.”

It takes all his willpower to stand his ground. He’s seen Hux snarl like that before. Last time, it nearly got him and Rose killed.

“How dare you,” Hux snarls.

“Which one is it, Hux?” Rose, kriff, this is for Rose. “Everyone thinks you’d do that, but that’s not what I got from Rose.”

He waits for a moment and then continues. “She’s in pain too. I mean, she’s brave. I bet you can feel it — she’s sick.”

“I can’t see how I could possibly help,” Hux says coldly. “ _I_ am  _quite_ well.”

“But she’s not,” Finn says placidly. “And I have this theory that it’s that — thing. That it, you know —”

He gestures vaguely with his hands, the way his old squadmates used to when they’d make rude jokes they thought he wouldn’t get.

“Maybe it would be less —”

Finn pauses. There’s a lot of words he could use for it and all of them likely to send Hux into another rage.

“Terrible?”

“Yeah,” Finn replies, relieved. “Trouble  is you’ll have to compromise a little to make it happen.”

“Oh I will, will I?” Hux sneers.

“Gotta be realistic, Hux,” says Finn. “You can help, or you can hang around like a sleemo creeper and it won’t do you any good, you know. What with all the murdering and blowing up people. Not exactly the best terms for wooing.”

Not, he notes to himself, that Hux is any good at wooing even without the bill of war crimes. Staring nerf-faced at a girl? Not a good way of pulling.

“My theory is,” Finn continues, “if it hurts her because when she’s with you she’s thinking of me and when she’s with me, that damn parasite’s thinking of you, then maybe if _both_ of us were around, it wouldn’t be so bad at all. If you care about her, you know, then this could — help.  _We_ could help.”

Hux turns six shades of red in quick succession. “ _You —_ ”

“And maybe, just maybe, you’d get a couple of hours sleep in. Later. Eventually.”

“If you think,” Hux hisses, “I’m going to participate in this ill-conceived, ill-construed —”

“Just think about it.” Finn claps Hux on the back exaggeratedly and hopes the Force will keep the veermok in the bag for at least ten seconds longer, enough for him to beat a hasty retreat. “Don’t be hasty.”

* * *

“So I think I have a solution,” Finn says, later, as they lie hip to hip in a tiny little shelter, on an even tinier bunk. “To your thing.”

“To my thing.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Your soulmate thing.”

“He’s  _not —_ ”

Finn presses a finger lightly to her lips. “Just hear me out.”

Everything about this screams bad ideas a dozen.

“Okay.”

“Well I was thinking,” he says. “You and me and him. All three of us. Maybe the answer isn’t running  _from_ it.”

Rose pulls a face at the thought. The last thing she wants to see is General Weasel-face with his shirt off. Blotchy and pale like underdone quadladunes, probably.

“Just think,” he continues, lowering his voice. Kriff, yeah its obvious, the way his breath ghosts against her ear, but it works. It kriffing works. “You and me and General War Crime down on his knees between us.”

His hand slips lower and comes to a rest on the inside of her thighs. She has to admit, the thought of Hux on his knees, doing whatever she tells him to do without arguing incessantly in that reedy ridiculous voice of his and his ridiculous uniform ripped open and thoroughly despoiled, sends a thrill through her.

“He talks too much,” she breathes.

His thumb traces a smooth circle. “So we find something for him to do with his mouth. Lots of things to do on his knees with his mouth.”

Rose hums. “Doesn’t sound too bad.”

“You don’t even need to touch him.” Finn presses a kiss to her shoulder. “If it bothers you.”

“Poor Hux.” She turns to look at him. “And you got him to agree to this?”

The hand on the inside stops moving. Kriff. It’s a mistake: it won’t work if this little pause makes her restless enough to put her hand on his and keep him moving.

“No,” Finn tells her uncertainly. “But if he comes  _around_ to it —”

“If he comes around to it,” she agrees.

* * *

He’s not a complete fool.

That is to say, he has a one-way open comm-line to everything the girl feels in a standard cycle and it’s been getting worse. Unsurprising, perhaps, since the droid report informed him he’d had the parasite in him since the age of fifteen. By his estimates it gives him a ten year advantage on the girl. Ten years for the creature to have wreaked untold damage in his nervous system. And it  _is_ his nervous system, regardless of the metaphysics behind the connection between her parasite and his. Everything she feels, he feels usually with a vague headache (more often than not a migraine, because the girl feels things in extremis, it seems) as a side-dish.

So he  _knows_. He had to take a pfassking break in the middle of a skirmish with a holdout flotilla of terrorist Seps along the Abrion line. It hardly required much by the way of genius, lying in his darkened room, to figure out  _what_ the girl was doing, considering he could feel every little bit of it all the way on the other side of the galaxy. Including the precise moment when she climaxed, presumably with FN’s hands all over her.

Like she is right now. Somewhere. On the other side of the galaxy. Meanwhile, he’s here on his own, flat on his back and all alone in his room — blissfully, mercifully dark — seeing stars and not in an enjoyable way. If he hadn’t pored over FN’s files in the wake of his traitorous defection, and if he didn’t know the girl better, he’d have suspected deliberate sabotage. Psychological warfare.

(The first meeting, the establishment of the truce for their mutual benefit, the girl crossed her arms and said to him:  _you’re not the only person who knows how to use people_. The baldest, stupidest statement of interest. She’d played all her cards.

At least, he assumes she’s played all her cards.)

_Think about it_.

If he didn’t know the traitor better, he’d think this was a fucking bad joke. A juvenile prank designed to embarrass and humiliate. His myriad inadequacies, thrown back in his face. So benign, so kind. Invited into bed with them, poor Hux, can’t make it with a girl, not even when a bloody sorcerous parasite ties her up to him.

As FN says, all the murdering, all the blowing up isn’t very conducive to wooing.

(And there they go again. It’s not enough to make him see stars once. No. They do it twice, even thrice. This time — there’s a ghost-like brush of lips, of someone’s tongue in the dip of his hip, an ambiguous warm weight on his stomach (FN’s hand on hers, presumably) and then lower — the uncanny and unfamiliar squirm-inducing sensation of pleasure in a body that’s not his pfassking own.

He can’t help it. Pushing his thighs together only delays the inevitable: the growing arousal, till he’s forced to stick his hand under the sheets and jerk himself off as a matter of habit, trying not to think about the girl and trying not think about how he can feel the way FN tongues at her, the ruined kriffing pyjamas, the blinding migraine. And all because the girl’s on the other side of the galaxy having  _fun_ while he lies here like a wilting hothouse flower.)

It could be a joke. An elaborate prank. He has nothing to lose at this point. Groaning, he presses the hydrogel pack to his head and reaches for his datapad.

* * *

“A hotel,” Poe says, holding up the decrypted message, scribbled untidily on a scrap piece of flimsiplast. “You guys going to tell me what’s going on?”

Rose, okay she has an okay sabacc-face. She looks back cool and collected, one eyebrow slightly raised. Finn it is then.

Finn’s a terrible liar.

“It’s not a trap,” he says, in a tone that suggests it’s  _exactly_ what it is.

“Uh huh,” Poe replies. “It says here there won’t be any need for me. That’s  _not_ suspicious at all. Right, Rose?”

Mentally, he rifles through all the reasons they’d need a hotel room instead of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of a Force-bubble forest — whatever that bantha shit with the lizards was about. If it kept the First Order off their backs, it was enough.

Wroona? Could be he was getting old, but that was asking for trouble. And not in the good trouble kind of way. The stupid, no good trouble kind of way. A couple of curious kids in stained clothes on Canto Bight? Still plausible; the place was a galactic tourist attraction. On Wroona, they’d stick out like a tauntaun on Tatooine.

Rose shrugs. “He probably doesn’t have information that requires your expertise.”

“Chickenshit, you mean,” he says. “So why does he need you two, then?”

“For,” Finn says slowly. “Reasons.”

“Reasons of loneliness,” says Rose. “And doubt. Which needs handholding. So he doesn’t change his mind. Who could help him better than us? Former trooper and me.”

“And you need to go with Finn because —”

“I bit him.”

It’s not a good lie. It’s a frankly terrible lie. It’s a bantha’s tail of a lie because Leia’s  _told_ him as much, the whole situation with the Force — and who kriffing  _knew_ the Force could do that kind of shit, right? — and parasites and zolamuts and the point is, someone’s going to have to give these two lessons in lying if they’re going to be gallivanting across the galaxy, cavorting with high ranking First Order officers in swank hotels on retiree planets like Wroona.

_Cavorting_.

“You know what,” he says. “I don’t want to know. You better get that freighter back in one piece though.”

They nod in unison.

Of all the things to be reassured by, Hux’s instinct for self-preservation is not something he’d ever expected to find any kind of comfort in. Whatever it is, he can trust Hux’s instinct for self-preservation to get these two back home. With the freighter. In one piece.

He never thought he’d come to contemplating teaching a couple of kids how to lie better about sneaking out.

“And don’t,” he says, “do anything I wouldn’t do.”

* * *

“Fancy,” says Rose, looking up at the hotel Hux has picked out. It’s long and low-slung, slightly curved around a curved, semi-circular road designed to let the speeders deposit their guests without a hassle.

Or at least, that’s what she imagines it’s for. The place is deserted except for a liveried droid walking a hound of some kind, and the other liveried droid standing at the entrance.

It’s more of the same inside. Deserted, empty, impressive. Nice ferns, though. Better than the piped in music, which reminds her of the computerized hold music that used to play in the industrial turbolifts that took people down into the mines on Hays Minor. The ferns add life to the place, keeping the dimly lit marble lobby from feeling too much like a stifling tomb.  

It’s possible it’s just the nervousness — which, she realizes, has been growing stronger the closer they get to this place, so it’s not her. It’s him. Again. Kriffing  _hell_.

“I can see why he likes this,” Finn murmurs in her ear.

The reception droid, she notes, as it searches the system for them, has its photoreceptors disconnected.

“Yeah well, that makes one of us,” she tells Finn.

They’re on the third floor, as it turns out.  _A seafacing room_ , the droid tells them, preparing to launch into a full sales-pitch before Finn rescues their key-card from the droid and they make their escape up the staircase. The very marble and wood-panelled staircase.

“I hope he’s paying,” she whispers to Finn, as they hurry along a thickly carpeted corridor. “I think Commander Dameron might kill us if this is on our bill.”

“Of course he’s paying,” Finn replies. “Officer’s expense privileges.”

She decides she doesn’t want to know why or how Finn knows this. Some First Order secrets are probably better off untouched. The way they should be.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Finn tells her. “Here. 311. You’re not nervous are you? We can leave if you don’t want to.”

“I’m not nervous,” she says, her stomach twisting nervously. It’s not her. It’s Hux, on the other side of that stupid door. “Are you nervous?”

Hux opens the door and crosses his arms.

“If you’re quite finished rousing the floor,” he sneers.

“If you’ll let us in, War Crime,” she says.

He moves aside. Barely. Rose shoves past him, deliberately brushing up against him as she goes. The back of his neck, exposed by the low collar of the dark robe he’s wearing, turn red. Kriff. If  _that’s_ how he’s going to be — they’re not going to get very kriffing far, are they.

She kicks off her boots. They should have thought this one through better. Much better.

“Drinks?” He holds up a bottle of what looks like whiskey.

“Kriffing hells,” Finn whispers, taking in the suite. She tries not to think about it, but sometimes it’s hard, suppressing that twinge of annoyance when he’s entranced by wealth. He’s never had nice shit, never had the chance to imagine even deserving it. It’s natural. She can tell herself all these things and it still doesn’t kill the flash of anger now, because he doesn’t know yet what it means to have all these people look down their plastic noses at him.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” She advances on Hux, while Finn pokes his head out the window. “I wouldn’t like it if you couldn’t perform, later.”

(He cleans up nice, if she’s frank. Without the uniform — but the uniform never really disappears now, does it? But at least the hideous symbol’s not leering down at her in mockery and his collarbones, barely revealed by the low-cut collar make it kind of worth it.)

He pours himself a glass. “One glass won’t do any harm.”

Oh he’s cool. But his knuckles are white around his glass and his glass is between the two of them.

(He’s not wearing shoes. Of all the kriffing things to latch onto. But his bare feet, half-sunk in the carpet, drives it all home. She’s going to pull him out of his robe and he’s going to stick his hand up her blouse and she’ll fuck Finn while he watches. Touches.

Kriff.)

She takes the glass from him, fingers brushing against his, and takes a long sip. His eyes flit from her to Finn, whatever he’s doing, and then settle on her throat.

It tastes horrible and it takes all her self-control to not let this show.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Finn putting his hand lightly on her back. On anyone else, it’d be possessive. The way Finn does it though, she can’t tell if it’s touch or if he’s pushing her at Hux. Something, anything to break the tension. “But uh, there’s no —”

“Bed,” she says, putting the glass back in Hux’s hand. “Why don’t you show us around.”

He leads them into the adjoining room, bigger than the last. Most of it dwarfed by the —

“That’s a — bed,” says Finn.

“A big bed,” she says.

“A really big bed,” he adds.

A half-the-room sized bed that looks like it’s been pulled straight out of a holofilm: low and flat, dark wood frames and a dark wood headboard, artsily quilted in geometric patterns that reappear again on the pillow-cases and the cover-sheet. Everything a little bit expensive and demanding like a carefully manufactured holofilm-set. Except it’s real, the sheets are soft and so is the mattress, where she presses it with her fists to test. It’s no holofilm-set and Hux is watching the two of them carefully, radiating nervousness and for once, she wishes she could just punch him and be done with it.

“Man these sheets are  _way_ better than the bantha shit they used to issue,” Finn says, already sprawled out on his back on a couple of the pillows. “So are the pillows. No offense.”

“None taken,” says Hux, looking suspiciously  _smug_.

“Not as good as Resistance issue,” she says, loyally.

“ _Klicks_ better,” Finn corrects her. He tosses her a pillow. “Look.”

She’s looking, alright. Just not at the pillow in her hands but at Hux, still hunched up on himself and his arms folded tight like he’d like nothing better than to shut them out right now. Even though he’s not the one the entry-droid scanned with an air of extreme prejudice and even though he kriffing booked the place in the first place — and if she goes on like this, all she’ll have is a further litany of crimes he’s committed and they won’t get anywhere at all. Least of all to getting Hux down on his knees: the only thing this kriffing parasite could be kriffing worth.

She pats the bed next to her invitingly. “You said you had information too.”

Hux approaches with caution, settling a careful distance from her before pulling a holocron out of his robe’s pockets.

“Information?” Finn blurts out, before she can catch his eye and glare-roll her eyes meaningfully. “Right. Information. That information.”

She edges closer. “What’s it this time, Hux?”

Finn’s a quick study. He settles on Hux’s other side.

“Coordinates,” says Hux. “There’s a shipment of tibanna gas travelling from the Seswenna sector to Christophsis. The Sep —”

His voice wavers and breaks as she leans against him, the length of her torso pressed to his side, and Finn does the same on the other.

“The Separatists,” Hux continues, despite Finn’s foot stroking his, “have a holdout on Rodia. But I understand you could use the fuel.”

“How much?”

“One thousand, five hundred and ten tonnes.” Kriff knows why, but the way he says it, nasal and sharp sets her itching to slap him.

That’s what this is about, right. He approaches them one day and tells them he could hand over their Supreme Leader, who he now knows has personal value to the Resistance. He’s using them, using her kriffing parasite to get a leg up inside the First Order. He sells them chickenshit. Lots of it, but it’s the best they have right now. If they win, he has an out. If he wins, he’s emperor of the whole rotten dung heap.

(She pushed, once, every moment of grief and rage she’d been carrying all tied up in a little bundle in a little hollow inside her chest, where she could keep it from escaping and hurting — the way she’d almost hurt Finn,  _had_ hurt Finn who had nothing to do with it — at him. And all he did was look down his stupid nose and tell her, in a rage of his own,    _you’re not the only one who’s suffered_. She’d do it again and again, till he learned. Till this stupid kriffing war folded up and disappeared. Except the war continues. The war doesn’t stop and the sleemo doesn’t apologize, even if he does lose every First Order battle after that moment in time and even if they’ve had less chickenshit off him lately and even if even if they’ve heard enough on their grapevine to know certain quarters are starting to ask dangerous questions about him.)

Rose hums, pulling her hair-tie off and shaking her hair out. “That’s not all is it?”

Finn rolls his eyes, but Hux looks away hurriedly at his feet and loses his train of thought.  _Win_ , she mouths at Finn.

“There’s an escort.”

“No kidding,” says Finn, experimentally putting a hand on Hux’s thigh.

Hux goes stiff all over.

“The escort,” he says, “has one of Ren’s pathetic friends on board.”

Finn’s hand slides up higher. “That is useful, isn’t it Rose?”

“Very.” She leans in real close, her tits pressed up against Hux’s arm and says in his ear: “So what’s the plan?”

“The plan,” Hux echoes, as she starts rubbing slow circles between his shoulders.

“To get rid off him,” says Finn. “Or her. Or them. Or —”

“You’re  _way_ too stiff,” she tells Hux, putting her other hand on his shoulder and squeezing. “You have to relax.”

_That’s cheating_ , Finn mouths at her, behind Hux. She sticks her tongue out at him.

“That,” says Hux, “is your concern.  _I_ am merely an intelligence source.”

“Tell us about the escort,” she says.

Again, the rising nervousness flip-flopping inside her stomach, as she starts massaging his shoulders. The hardest part is remembering it’s not just her feeling him, he can feel her too in that same vague stream of emotion. Of course he has to know the anger isn’t him: he’s only angry when he’s bossing around his endless ream of subordinates, or being bossed around, in turn, by Kylo Ren. Sure, that’s nearly ninety percent of the time and in the early days his disdain for her frequently slipped into rage. But now, it’s only ever nervous excitement when she’s near and so of course, he’d know, the anger isn’t him, it’s her.

“One upsilon class shuttle,” he says. “Five TIEs. Ren’s pet will be in the shuttle.”

Rose closes her eyes and deliberately forces the anger and the nervousness down, concentrating on all the other nicer things about him. (Too few, but she has to try and Finn with his shirt half opened and sprawled on the pillows, earlier, is too much for her to let them beat a hasty retreat). Like how warm he is through his robe. The pungent smell of his aftershave. The softer, delicate smell of his shampoo, still fragrant as though he’d only just finished drying and combing his hair before they arrived.

The way his breathing is slowing. The way she can feel, so close to him spatially, Finn kneading gently at the inside of her thigh though Finn’s hands are on him.

“And a deep space squadron?” Finn asks him.

“And a deep space squadron,” Hux replies. “Twelve trained troopers.”

She presses her thumbs along the back of his neck. His hair is soft there, untouched by whatever the pfassk he puts on his head to make his hair sit flat and horrible. Not today, not now though, which makes him a little less harsh and unassailable. A little less inhuman, in the way he leans into her touch like an overgrown tooka-cat.

“So are you going to tell us how to get the shipment?” she asks him.

“You’re the specialists in running headfirst into trouble,” he replies. “Explosions.”

“You’re thinking of Dameron,” Finn tells him.

“I’m serious.” A tiny sound escapes the back of Hux’s throat. “Blow the shuttle up. Blow the TIEs up. The freighter’s artillery system is it’s only defense.”

Rose slips her hand inside his collar and down the front of his robe.

His voice wavers only a little: “You have the remote access codes.”

“Not helpful,” says Finn. “You gotta tell us the model.”

She nips gently at Hux’s earlobe. A sigh escapes him — barely. He’s tightly in control, always in control of everything. Always bossing people around, even kriffing rebel scum like her (do they listen? No, but the point is: he tries anyway).

“It’s an IT-4200,” he says breathily.

“Who’s going to be on that freighter?” Finn continues. “More troopers?”

“Two officers,” Hux answers. “Six troopers —”

Finn reaches for the robe’s ties as she tugs it slowly off Hux’s shoulders.

Unlike her, his mark is at an awkward angle below his right shoulder blade. It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, but she suddenly wants to know where and how he got his; whether it was in the middle of an act of unbearable wrong, or if he, like her, just stumbled and fell in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he was only found or if there'd been too much dark clouding him and it'd lured one of those rats in with the stink: dark to dark, multiplying infinitely the way they did back home in those last days. She’d always thought it meant something to have one of these. Hers is three-pronged and in retrospect, she’d imagined it was the Force reading her future: a rebel in the offing, off to fight for justice and freedom. His would, by nature, be her opposite: the Empire’s spoked wheel or something that would demonstrably prove their differences. Only his could have been a kriffing birthmark if not for its blackened outline. It’s a blob. A kriffing blob and there’s no meaning, nothing special to it. It just is: a forcedamn kriffing disease.

A parasite.

“Are you all right?” Hux asks her.

“Yeah.” She forces a smile though he can’t see. Kriff. Finn gives her a look like he’s not buying. He’s going to say something, he’s going to call her bluff and collapse this —

She puts a hand on the back of Finn’s neck and pulls him closer. “I’m fine, Hux.”

She kisses Finn, Hux caught between them. Finn puts a hand on her hip and tugs, till she’s pressed up right along Hux’s back. The phantom touch of someone’s forefinger and thumb brushes against the inside of her tit and heat flares in her stomach. A whine escapes both her and Hux and Finn tilts away and grins like a tooka-cat that’s got in the cream — and had all of it.

“He’s good isn’t he,” she says in Hux’s ear, slipping her arm around him so she can touch his other side.

“They’ll have thermal detonators,” Hux stutters. Finn’s got his hands on his trousers and Rose can’t help the way her hips jerk forward against his back.

Synthatex pants.  _What_ was she thinking.

“Here.” She pushes him gently towards Finn. “Finn.”

His hair’s soft, without that stupid gel he puts in it. Soft and loose enough for her to comb through it. Twist it, lightly as Finn cups his cheek and kisses him. She can feel him open his mouth — feels the same thrill that makes him shiver when Finn slides his tongue into his mouth. The same way it knocks the breath out of him, his long ragged breaths dissolving into hers, dissolving into Finn’s as he pulls back wide-eyed and serious.

“And blasters,” Hux mumbles, eyes still shut.

She ought to be gentle. But her fingers twist sharply in his hair and she yanks his head back (and kriff, the sharp shooting sensation isn’t pain, it shoots straight to her cunt.) and kisses him. And this time there’s no sharp skewering sensation, no regrets and no fantasies about how she ought to be kissing Finn, because all she can think of is how his lips are wet and spit-slick from Finn kissing him and how pliant he is under her touch and how he gives way when her tongue slides against his.

“And —” Hux breathes, when she releases him.

“Hux,” she says. “Shut up.”

* * *

It’s not everyday he gets to see his girlfriend turn one of his commanding officers into a hot mess and if someone had told him he’d be sitting with his hand on this guy’s junk while watching his girlfriend kiss him and he’d find it hot he’d have laughed and said: nightmareish, you mean. But Rose has her hand on Hux’s throat while she sticks her tongue in his mouth and the pitiful moan that Hux gives makes his cock twitch.

It’s not that they don’t get rough or push when they’re lying in their tiny bunk together. It’s just the — everything. Her hair tumbling down her shoulder and cascading over Hux’s face. The way her fingers move tentatively over his Adam’s apple. The intentness with which she bent over Hux — the same intentness she turns on him every time they’ve kissed, whether he’s bending over her or she’s sitting on his lap or that time she saved him and nearly got himself killed.

He just can’t help himself. Hux gives her a stupid, smitten grin when she finally lets him go. Any other time and he’d stop, think about it, but now all he can think about is her mouth: he pulls her to him and yeah, maybe it’s selfish but he wants her to look at  _him_ , just  _him_ right now.

“Lose the jacket,” she mumbles against his mouth. “Please.”

He slips a hand between the buttons on her shirt and inside her bra. Hux gasps, behind her. He’s still figuring that one out: every time he touches one of them, the other makes sounds like a holoporn star (not that he’s ever had the chance — but he’s  _heard_ from — well rumour had it and Slip said, Nines said, who heard it from the TeeKays, before they got sent for reconditioning). Another one of those things he wouldn’t have believed would set him feeling like pulling Rose’s shirt off if he’d been told about it.

“ _Jacket_ ,” she says insistently. “Kriff —”

She pushes his hands off her waist so she can push Poe’s old jacket off.

“Not the —” he starts. Too late. His blaster goes flying with the jacket and he silently thanks the Force for kriffing safety catches.

His shirt joins the jacket on the floor. He has his own revenge a half-second later when he accidentally sends a button flying as he tries to get her shirt off.

“My bra,” she tells Hux.

Hux takes his time, slipping his fingers under her straps and sliding them off her shoulders so he can kiss her bare skin.

“ _Quickly_ ,” she tells him.

Hux grins and kisses her shoulder again, before unfastening the clasp. Finn watches, mesmerized, as Hux obscenely half-mouths, half-licks a long strip down her shoulder and back. He’s got his hands on her trousers and Finn’s starting to realize his own trousers are feeling a little too tight.

“Finn,” she says breathlessly, as Hux pulls her underwear down and presses his mouth to her thighs.

Later, he won’t be able to say what happens next: maybe Hux kisses her cunt and she’s not ready for it, or she pushes Hux away first, or maybe it’s her breathing his name while Hux is the one kissing her. The next thing he does know is she’s unbuttoning his trousers and has him in her hand while Hux goes from looking like a kicked tooka to ready to murder in half a second. Murder him, specifically. And he should worry about this — guy probably has a knife hidden up those pyjamas if the First Order rumour mill was right. But kriff, Rose wraps her fingers around him and jerks, as she pulls him in for a deep kiss and everything dissolves into technicolor bliss and white noise.

“So,” Hux cuts in acidly, from the bed, “am I supposed to sit back and enjoy the show?”

The problem with this — thing. Parasite. Whatever. Is that the two of them have this Force thing going on and he’s tuned in on the wrong frequency, missing half the bantha crap passing between them. Such as the reason why Rose takes her time letting go of him, or why she pushed Hux away half a minute ago when just a little before she’d let him undress her.

She pulls back and she’s got this — look. Dangerous. Not  _Canto Bight_ dangerous, but he wouldn’t cross her. Not with that glint in her eyes, when she pulls back, hands still around his neck and body still pressed up against him.

“I think we can find something for him to do,” she asks him, “don’t you, Finn?”

He was half-joking when he first brought up Hux down on his knees between the two of them, but now —

The look in Hux’s eyes though — he wouldn’t go there, but Rose likes poking the rancor’s nest and Rose is a little reckless: they have to be, to be rebels, but Rose also rides fathiers through casinos and laughs gleefully and looks fur-clad arms dealers in the eye and demands belligerently to know what they think they’re looking at.

Or, on her knees, bites Hux’s hand while he has his whole army behind him. That’s just the kind of girl she is. Real Resistance material.

“Not like that,” she tells Hux. “On your knees.”

Hux goes red. Three shades and he bares his teeth in a snarl, but Rose just looks back at him coolly.

Hux slides to his knees without a word.

“Not me,” she says. “Turn.”

Maybe it’s the Force. Or Hux and whatever the hell’s going on inside his brain — whatever the hell brought him here in the first place. Jury’s still out. Hux turns and looks up at him with a glare that could melt durasteel.

Years of crawling later, there comes a point when the body can’t take it anymore and the whole system ends up in revolt. He took his chance and ran when he could, but it doesn’t mean there weren’t months of dreaming beforehand. Not of revenge, but returning and maybe laughing at them for all they thought they could hold on to him.

And it’s not that he’s spent time thinking what it’d be like to have Hux on his knees. He’s not the vengeful type. He’d only half meant it when he said it to Rose.

But.

Given the  _chance —_

And Hux, on his knees, right now, looking up at him like he’d like nothing better than to gut him slowly with a vibroknife than take his cock in his mouth and still, despite this, inching kriffing forward, is a special kind of fantasy come true. The kind you don’t know you need until someone’s whispering it in your ear or it’s happening.

Hux puts a tentative hand on him and sucks slowly at the tip of his cock. His eyes droop shut as he swallows, deeper, and hums around Finn’s cock. It sends an electric jolt down his spine: Hux, on his knees, mouthing at his cock with wild abandon, looking like every juvenile fantasy they’d conjured up while jerking themselves off furiously in the ‘fresher before they could slip into their ‘trooper uniforms. General Hux, shut up for once in his kriffing life, except when he’s moaning like a Nar Shaddan whore.

“Rose,” he moans hoarsely. If he goes on like this, there won’t be any fucking for the two of them.

She tugs Hux’s hair sharply. “ _Stop moving_.”

“Kriff,” Finn breathes, as Hux stills with a grunt of protest, halfway down his cock.

Rose pulls his head down for another kiss. She’s all warm and soft — they don’t get a lot of time on the run: there’s always synthatex jackets and trousers, someone around or it’s too dark and there’s some kind of hurry. It’s all quick and a little dirty. Not like now, where he can kiss her neck and enjoy the heavy, perfect weight of her breast cupped in his hand, or the way her nipples go stiff when he runs his thumb softly over them. Here and now: he can look. Savour. Trace the place where her waist curves inwards and the softness at her hips till she whimpers.

The dark curls between her thighs. Sure he’s fucked her with his mouth, but it’s different in the dark and different under the light like now. He slips two fingers between her lips and kriff, she’s so karking wet and warm and for about half a moment it’s too pfassking much, between the way she whines and Hux’s fingers gripping his thighs and Hux’s mouth around him.

“Finn,” she breathes. “ _Move_.”

He grins and pulls her closer, till she’s almost half straddling Hux’s shoulders, and crooks his fingers so he can touch her  _properly_. Hux moans and it goes straight through his cock as he rubs tiny circles on her clit. He’s not going to — if he doesn’t —

Rose’s teeth graze his neck.

“Quickly,” she begs.

But not now. Not like this, not with her breathing open-mouthed against his neck and whimpering as he teases her open. Not with Hux, whimpering, with his eyes screwed shut tight. And maybe it’s wrong, wrong to think this way but he can’t stop himself from letting his hand slide down Rose’s side and fall to where Hux is, just to — trace his jaw, trembling slightly from the effort of holding Finn in his mouth — and if he was  _cruel_ he’d cup his chin and say, lightly, good boy.

But the trembling in Hux’s jaw sets his stomach fluttering and maybe it’s doubly wrong, but he can’t help brushing a stray lock off Hux’s forehead where it’s flopped forward.

Hux’s fingers dig hard into his thighs.

“Finn,” Rose whines.

He slides one finger into her, then another and presses his thumb against her clit. Her mouth’s all swollen from his kisses, Hux’s kisses. He wonders if whatever the hell it is means Hux can feel it when he kisses her now and what it feels like to have a cock in his mouth and then the phantom sensation of a tongue in his mouth, from where he’s kissing Rose. Whether Rose can taste him in Hux’s mouth. Whether she can feel his cock heavy on Hux’s tongue. The thought sets him burning all over and makes him squirm, even if all  _he_ can feel is the flat of Hux’s tongue on his cock, all wet and messy, and his breath, humid, against his thighs — Hux’s fingers, light and gentle at the back of his thighs and Rose’s fingers digging into his shoulders, Rose’s breath ragged, uneven and urgent as she cries out at his touch.

She moans into his neck and he can feel her — kriff, the flexing, hot and strange around his fingers — tighten before she comes, digging her fingernails into his back for purchase.

“Kriff,” he whispers. “ _Kriff_.”

He’s so close, so kriffing close and Rose must sense this, because the next thing he knows is she’s got her hand on the back of Hux’s head and she’s pushing Hux up against him. Hux gags, but he doesn’t get a chance to stop her, because Hux is moving and Hux tilts his head a little and then he’s hitting the back of Hux’s throat and Hux has him in all the way to the hilt before he starts moving up and down on him, stopping only to lick his cock like — like the obscene pink candy they sell on Coruscant, laced and for guys and girls pulling in seedy cantina bars — and then Rose puts her mouth against his nipples and it’s too much, too kriffing much and he only just about remembers to pull his cock out of Hux’s mouth, before he’s splattering come down the side of Hux’s fucking face.

* * *

He’s  _seething_. She can feel it like a pure shot of adrenaline up her spine: rage and shame and underneath that, arousal. He’s squirming, trying to hide the way his pyjamas are rough, but not rough enough to pleasure him; not  _tight_ enough to pleasure him.

He needs them. Both of them.

Rose puts her hand under his chin and turns his head slightly to look at him. He’s all messy and streaked, from where Finn came all over him. His jaw’s clenched tight. Still so kriffing stiff; always wound up, all the time. It can’t be good for him: all work, no fun, all terror and shame and guilt that he could  _enjoy_ this.

Finn’s too nice for him. He threads his fingers gently through Hux’s hair and says,  _you don’t just have to look_. Like this is about  _fairness_. Or  _wanting_.

Hux has spent his whole life wanting things and getting it. Or taking it. Meanwhile, she’s got a mark on her wrist that says she can’t have the one thing she wants, because there’ll always be a part of her thinking about Armitage fucking Hux. A kriffing parasite, warping her all over, for its own karking survival. Never kriffing mind what she wants.

He thinks he can look at her like that — eyes sliding slowly up her legs, up her body, till he can look her in the eye — and she’ll — kriff. Find herself lured in by the intensity of his gaze and the way he looks up at her with a question in his eyes. She’s not — she has to force herself to keep her hands where they are, one at her side, another on his chin, when his gaze drops downwards to her thighs. If she covers herself, he’ll know or he’ll think he knows when he doesn’t know a kriffing thing.

All he knows is the taking: bending and kissing her cunt just because she let him unhook her bra and undress her. She’d felt in that moment, the sudden overwhelming rush of desire except it wasn’t her. It was all him. Him, wanting. Him, taking. Well she wasn’t going to let that happen. She  _isn’t_ going to —

It knocks the breath out of her when he puts his hand flat on her stomach and looks at her, half-pleading.

(In that funny place in the hollows of her, where they now both live: that feeling again, the one that doesn’t belong to her, the one that terrifies her.)

“Please,” he mouths silently.

She puts her hand on his. If she was smart, she’d push him away and take Finn instead. But he has this look in his eyes and worst of all, she can feel that dizzying swirl of yearning hunger — and she can’t help think about the mark below his shoulder and how there’s a history to it as all scars and marks have histories, as the scar on her temple has a history and as the thick, gnarled blaster-mark on his hip has a history.

She slides his hand up and cups it around her breast. A whispered  _kriff_ escapes him. His fingers are slender and bony under hers. Smooth. He’s never done a hard day’s work in his life. Everything he knows is theoretical: machines, systems, simulations, mechanical battles that send hundreds and thousands to their deaths. Buttons — he pushes buttons. He pushes buttons with the same fingers she’s moving, to squeeze, to rub against her nipples.

It’s possible, she thinks, distantly, he sent mom and dad to death with a flourish of his wrist, stylus rolled between his fingers (now: her nipple, between his forefinger and thumb).

It’s as close to an invitation she’ll ever give him. Ever.

He’s too gentle in the way he presses his mouth against the inside of her thigh. He runs the flat of his tongue against her skin. Slow, tender. Heat floods her stomach and she moans as he nips lightly — as Finn whispers  _nine hells_.

Kriff. He’s already getting hard again, just watching them. She ought to — ought not — but Finn was the one who thought this up, the one who wanted it, wanted her bad enough to do this — and he has that heavy-lidded inviting look and she should really,  _really_ leave him out of this starwreck before it all goes zero.

“Come here,” she tells him softly.

She takes Finn in hand, murmuring his name, as Hux parts her folds with his tongue. He’s  _earnest_ , is the trouble. Her head is a dizzying swirl of emotions that aren’t her own. All that grounds her is the warm, pulsing heat of Finn’s cock as she strokes slowly and the wet, squirming heat of Hux tracing circles on her clit with his tongue.

“Finn,” she moans, as Hux teases her cunt with the tip of his tongue.

Hux keeps going, but there’s an aggressive edge now, to the way he fucks her with his tongue.  _Is it Finn_ , she wants to scream. Just: Finn. She runs a thumb along the underside of Finn’s cock and he cries out and it does nothing to get rid of Hux or — or —

(That feeling, again. The one that feels like her feet have been knocked out from under her, or the air’s been squeezed out of her.

The one that doesn’t belong to her.)

But the trouble — the trouble is — that stupid mark on his shoulder and how she fell one day, skidding between Central Ridge’s office and the oredigger where there was a fight going on and the First Order bastard had his blaster out and fired and maybe it was supposed to fire into the air, maybe it wasn’t but someone landed up shot and mom shouted,  _go home now_ which was when she tripped over stray mining equipment, sliced her wrist open against the rubble and dirt and it hurt like nine kriffing hells and it hurt even more because there was a zolamut with it's fangs sunk deep into her skin and something evil was crawling into her and making its home inside her — and it’s that stupid mark which means somewhere the zolamut attacked him one day, that it smelt something and the something was one of the dark little corners of the galaxy where the plague and the evil could fester and thrive, that something opened him up and somewhere he saw something terrible that somehow severed time and space and stitched them both together because —

Because.

Hux sucks at her clit and she can’t stop the cry that escapes her.

She doesn’t want to understand.

She shouldn’t — but she pulls Finn close and kisses him, sucks on his lower lip and waits till he tilts his head and opens his mouth against hers and it’s good. It’s good and Finn is everything: Finn cares, he came here, came for this, for her, just so maybe they could have a chance of some kind. And here they are, Finn’s pressing kisses down her neck, down her shoulder, on her tit, while she jerks him off and there’s kriffing Hux between them. Hux and the whole fucking galaxy, the fucking Force.

Hux, Hux, kriffing fucking Hux. The  _one_ asshole in the entire galaxy she’d rather murder — and he has his mouth on her cunt and she fucking  _hates_ his stupid hair, his stupid face, that stupid fucking mark and the fact that she’s standing here with his mouth on her cunt and tears pricking at her eyes because it’s not that she asks for much, just the one guy who looks at her like she’s the whole galaxy and the Force couldn’t even give her that, not even that.

“Are you —” says Hux.

“Did I tell you to stop?” she demands thickly.

She yanks his hair roughly, jerking him back where he was again. He makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat as she shoves herself against him. But he moves and his breath ghosts, damp and warm and uneven, against her skin and he takes it, when she jerks her hips against his mouth, forcing his tongue hard up against her.

Finn is close. He's half-mumbling, half-moaning her name, his forehead pressed to hers. Rose. Rose. It comes out in an irregular tattoo, in time to his shorter, ragged breaths. If she just — watch him, only him, tune out everything else, tune out — shut  _him_ out —

Hux hums into her and her fingers twist reflexively in his hair. His nose is pressed deep into her curls. Every breath, she can feel every kriffing breath and the way he inhales deeply, breathing her in as if — and it’s hot and muggy and everything’s slowing to a grinding crawl, narrowed into his thumb on the inside of her thigh, making slow circles and his mouth working overtime. It’s hot, the room’s too kriffing hot and there’s a fog settling in her brain, like a sunny, humid D’Qar afternoon when the sweat makes every inch of your clothing stick to you and you can only curl up in a corner and sleep and try to ignore the way the stickiness of your panties makes you think of sex and the way Nix’s sweaty shoulders look as he works on the bomber, stripped down to his waist.

She needs to — she can’t — it’s a game of tabaga and vrelt and he has her up against a corner, sinking into her skin, into her mind like a rising suffocating tide (and fuck, why didn’t they turn the climate control down) and she can’t let him — if she can shut him out, just a little bit —

Finn. Rose forces her eyes open. He’s kriffing beautiful like this, unaware and lost. His jaw goes tense, his forehead crinkles as though he’s locked in fierce concentration when he’s close. Something about it reminds her of Crait, his ski-speeder melting around him and the grim expression she glimpsed just before she drove hers into his except instead of death, it’s pleasure. He’s not going to die. He’s alive. Her hair is wrapped around his fingers and his fingers are trembling. He’s making small, choked thrilling noises that settle at the base of her spine and set her hair on end in the best fucking way. If she wrapped her fingers around his wrist instead of his cock, she’d feel his heart beating a hundred uneven, arhythmic times a minute. His lips are brushing hers and what she can feel instead of his heartbeat, are the short, sharp breaths he exhales, strange and gentle and more intimate than a kiss, more intimate than when he cups her chin and he runs his thumb softly along her lower lip before kissing her.

His fingers tighten in her hair. A shudder goes right through her at the sting, at Hux’s surprised yelp. It hurts, kriff, it hurts, but he whispers her name and she can’t help smiling and pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

(Fury, sudden and painful. Just a second — just a second longer — she can hold on —)

Finn’s cock pulses in her hand and he comes all over Hux’s hair, moaning her name.

Hux digs his fingernails tight into her thigh and thrusts his tongue into her cunt roughly and the burn of pain against the rough-smooth sensation feels so fucking good. She has to — but his hand is moving along her thigh, he’s skirting his fingers along her lower abdomen. Her hips jerk involuntarily forward. She’s sinking, sinking lower into the white hot heat that’s threatening to swallow her alive. The parasite writhes painfully, bunched up under her skin, prickled and spiny and like a million-legged monster crawling up the insides of her nervous system. Hux has her wrist in his hand. His grip is too tight and it fucking hurts, she can’t wrestle free of him. But she put him here and if she pushes him away now, she’ll lose whatever game of chicken-walking they’re playing.

He pulls his mouth away from her. Rose tries to protest. Hux  _don’t_ , she says. But the muggy D’Qar afternoon heat feeling is back and her tongue is leaden and heavy in her mouth and all that comes out is  _Hux_ in a breathy moan. Don’t.  _Don’t_ , but he can’t hear. He presses his mouth to the black mark on her wrist.

“Hux,” she breathes. He runs his tongue along the central spindle, the body of the starbird as she’d always imagined it.  _Stop_. No, kriff. She doesn’t want him to stop.

Not now.

He licks, obscenely, along the lines. Her breath catches and she can’t help giving in to the burning desire to look.

The look he gives her is pure filth. His eyelashes flutter low, beckoning her dangerously closer. But his eyes are bright, too kriffing bright and hard as durasteel and it’s  _wrong_ , like how the ore slurry looked like solid ground, and you’d only know they weren’t when you stepped in and were up to your neck in slurry. It’s treacherous, dangerous, it’s —

Fury, violent, uncontrollable fury seizes her; chokes her thick as the dust that killed home. Underneath, humiliation driving the rage. A bitter taste, like smelt-poisoning, blooms at the back of her mouth. It’s Hux. It’s all Hux. She’d like to scratch his face off, but it isn’t her feeling it, it’s that feeling cracking her ribs. It’s that kriffing parasite, writhing painfully underneath his mouth.

She gasps, as he slips one, then another finger into her. It ought to be rough, to match the rage. But then he presses his mouth to the inside of her thigh and the rage dissolves into fierce longing and desperation. It hurts, almost, how much of it unspools inside the hollow of her chest. It ought to be less: he always makes a point of being cool, distant, even with all the balled up hurt and pain thrown right at him, he just looked back at her glacial cold, like she was nothing and all of this was nothing to him.

His fingers move slowly, gently —  _tantalizingly_ — as he mouths at her thigh.

No it’s not right. He looked at her cold but she’d felt that flash of heat, that dizzying anger, the kind that could knock her right out. He’s an ice cold barren wasteland that hides a boiling, destructive core underneath.

She gets under his skin.

He crooks his fingers and thrusts, rougher this time. There’s a roaring in her ears: white static, holonet noise.  _Hux_. Her thighs are starting to tremble under the soft touch of his fingers, his mouth — kriff, he moves his mouth and kisses her curls as he thrusts again and her vision blanks, a little. The hungry want unfurls forcefully inside her ribs and it hurts like she’s on fire, plasma fire that burns up bodies from the inside and the out.

_Hux_ , she hears herself say, urgently.

He breathes her in and whispers  _Rose_ , right up against her curls. It hurts, in the hollows of her, all the too much-ness as he thrusts his fingers in harder, faster. He teases lightly at her labia with his tongue and she doesn’t try stopping the cry it wrenches out of that hollowed, private part of her between her ribs and her diaphragm where they now both live. Her hands twist in his hair, searching for purchase: her thighs are trembling and every breath is treacle-thick. She’s drowning, all those leaden burning feelings, rising through her stomach, through her cunt and the roaring in her ears almost drowns out him, whispering her name against her clit, drowns out everything, till her vision blanks and the parasite claws itself free out of all the empty spaces she’s trapped it in and want, rage, reluctance, longing, humiliation, hunger, desperation, something softer, scarier than anything else she’s ever felt violently seize her and everything turns a bright, melting hot white and like a bomber going down with a full load, implodes on itself.

Sand. Between her toes. Sun — bright, sharp, burning on the back of her neck. Everywhere she looks, sand. Endless, flat, stretches of white, in every direction, melting in a heat-hazy blur on the horizon. Sound filters in. Cheering, raucous, loud. Feet, scuffling and skidding on the sand. The clash of plasteel. Grunts. A scream.

White hot laserknife pain in her right shoulder. Burns down her back. Falling. A tearing, inside. Something rips. Splits. She tumbles to the side, ghost-like, unreal, sand burning between her fingers.

A red-haired boy lies where she was a few seconds ago. His face is twisted in pain. He moves: the sand is stained red under his shoulder. His fingers are wrapped loosely around the stem of a Force-pike, one of those weapons the First Order favours for its defenses. Another Force-pike is aimed at his throat, this one held by a black-haired boy who looks about the same age.

The sand ripples. A blackness swamps his shoulder. The sand moves, a creature burrowing out: snub snout, blind as a quadladune and those vibroknife sharp fangs. The blackness thickens, the way she remembers it — the stinging, harsh pain in her wrist while the hazy, shapeless blackness clouded her wrist and her tongue felt like a fucking sponge in her mouth and the screams stuck like heavy selakale stew in her throat. He cries out, knuckles white around his pike. Writhes, in the sand, while the sand writhes under him. It disappears, the blackness, as abruptly as it came.

Hux, she realizes with a jolt.

“Give it up,” the black-haired boy spits.

Hux snarls. His pike smashes the boy’s away. He stumbles to his feet. His uniform is torn at his shoulder. The same place as his scar. Parasite. The blackness, sinking in, against the damp-dark blood staining the torn cloth. Skittering along the side of his face. In his eyes: bright and terrifying. He brings his pike down heavily against the other boy’s. Twists and rolls his under it, hooks the other boy’s ankle and brings him down.

Hux scans the crowd. Settles for a moment on another red-haired man, who looks almost like a carbon-copy of Hux in the present, just greyer, stouter, heavier-set; watching with pursed lips. His head dips slightly and then he claps, reluctantly with the rest of the crowd. Hux’s expression is terrifying. Blank and terrifying.

The dark-haired boy goes still. His own pike, sticking out his left shoulder.

“An accident,” she hears Hux tell a medic, crouching over the boy.

Hux turns, away from the crowd and his eyes meet hers. A medic is tugging at his sleeve. He ignores him. This isn’t a desert, she realizes. There are bones everywhere. Dried up skeletons. Human, skeletons. Ribs. Femurs. Humeruses. Ulnas. Tiny finger bones, sharp white stones. The desert is a sea of dead. Invisible. A mirage, till she upsets it. Looks at it sideways. Looks wrong. Hux stares, bright-eyed, jaw clenched tight, pike trembling his hand.

The ground yanks away. She stumbles, falls. The ground opens, dark, tearing. It swallows her whole. Folds her up, half, quarters, eighths: the desert, the bones, the sun, herself, her body. Pushes. Compacts. Flattens, squeezes and slams her into a thin little line before spitting her back out.

Rose comes to slowly, the room gradually growing sharper. Finn is calling her name, she realizes. His hand is on her arm: she didn’t even realize it. He’s frowning in concern, but his eyes are wide, terrified as though he’s just seen a rancor.

“I’m fine,” she croaks hoarsely.

She can taste his terror.

No — he looks relieved when she says it, but the terror lingers. Fear, like the rage that drowned her earlier, like —

Rose looks down at Hux, breathing harshly and heavily between her thighs, and as their gazes meet, an irresistible urge to push him away and flee, run away — to the ‘fresher, to the other room, anywhere but away — before he can break the silence and before he can say anything about the desert, the dead boy or the parasite slithering across the sand and into the wound on his back seizes her. Before she can laugh at him, or before she looks at him with pity and touches him like he’s a charity case, deserving only of her sympathy and a squalid pity fuck because she saw, without context, his father turn away and leave him standing alone in the desert sand but she doesn’t fucking know —

Rose puts a hand on his cheek. It’s like a physical force when it slams in, pushing her mind away. The muscles in his shoulders are tensing, like a wounded cantalope struggling to spring free from one of those cruel durasteel hunting traps that mangle the animals it traps, leaving them to bleed slowly to death or else limp miserably free only to be hunted down by some other, better predator or lie down and die. No. No that's not entirely right. Hux is no cantalope. Cantalopes are harmless, beautiful creatures and Hux is neither of those — though Finn is. But if Finn’s a wounded cantalope, barely escaped from the durasteel jaws of the First Order, then Hux is a veermok: most dangerous when wounded and almost unkillable, especially in a rage. And kriff knows Hux is all rages, little else, except when he's giving her that frightening hungry look.

She’d once imagined a million boys like Finn. Stolen, brainwashed and robbed of their childhoods. Like Finn, naive and innocent about the galaxy. Once she’d thought it, it was easier to imagine how Finn could see the galaxy in its smallest possible terms and miss the veins for the nuggets.

Hux is none of that.

Rose cups his cheek with her other hand. Terror and rage that isn’t hers war inside her. It hurts. Like two warring hawkbats, flapping at each other inside her chest, claws out in full force.

Beneath all of it, the same feeling she’d felt earlier when Finn came all over his face and then the back of his head. That same, see-saw, funny feeling when the greying, heavy-set, stouter version of Hux clapped reluctantly, bored expression twisting his mouth while Hux stood there, parasite burrowing into his skin under the bright desert sun on some unidentifiable planet.

She kneels and kisses him. Gently at first. He’s stiff and unyielding. The pushing sensation at the back of her mind amplifies and maybe, Finn and she rushed into this without thinking this through — and maybe, so did he.

The wall pushing against her mind dissolves and his fingers brush tentatively against her jaw. A tiny helpless noise escapes the back of Hux’s throat and his mouth moves against hers. His other hand rests against her cheek. He tilts his head and deepens the kiss.

* * *

The girl must think he’s an idiot if she believes he can’t feel her broadcasting every single insignificant feeling of hers at full blast, all channels a-go. Or worse, ten years make all the difference between sometimes knowing and knowing in all it’s minutiae and because the galaxy is ruled by perverse forces, bent on turning his life into a special kind of torturous hell. Even now, the nerves at the back of his head are jangling painfully at the storm of emotions she’s beaming at him. Confusion, frustration, anger, reluctance, something sad underneath. The last thing he needs is crumbs off a fucking table, leftovers of whatever she’s already given to FN — sorry,  _Finn_ , as she insists on telling him as though he isn’t well aware and as though there’s no pleasure to be derived from seeing  _Finn_ squirm everytime he calls him FN.

He’d rather she leave. Or he leave, rather than this: her pushing him slowly on to his back and straddling him while screaming refusal, want and pathetic half-hearted compassion at him. Not the warmth she directs at FN, oh no, the same stupid feeling she has rescuing mice from the over-sized lizards that prowl the warehouse on Myrkr.

What’s worse: the smallness of her feeling for him, or the fact that he’s still lying on the floor under her, letting her fumble at his pyjamas and tug them down just for the way it makes him shiver and leaves him breathless and lightheaded. Pathetic. He has the whole bloody galaxy in the palm of his hand (nominally, true; but Ren’s cognitive incapacities and bloodymindedness really mean he’s de-facto head, whatever else Ren believes he is) and it makes no bloody difference; it’s been one long kriffing joke.

What’s worse is the horrible, gnawing fear that it quite possibly hasn’t mattered for a long while, long before Rose upset his carefully constructed plans.

Her hands are gentle. So gentle, even with the rough calluses and the bitten, blunted fingernails she rakes down his chest.

“Turn,” she breathes. “On your knees.”

And now the moment of revelation. The joke unveiled. He’ll eat the crumbs. She’ll return and the two of them will laugh, along with the rest of the scum, about how Armitage Hux, Grand Marshal of the First Order, takes it on his knees and likes it when traitors come all over his face.

But it never comes.

She puts her hand, flat, between his shoulder blades and pushes till he's down on his elbows.

“Finn,” she says. “The —”

The joke worsens. Her nervous anticipation sticks in his craw. But why shouldn’t she. It’s FN she’s dangling after. They’re mere inconveniences to each other: her in his way to the top, him in her way to chaos and FN’s trousers.

She teases lightly at his entrance. He can’t see FN’s bare feet half-buried in the thick carpet anymore. His cheeks flame at the thought: FN standing behind her and watching as she slowly slides a finger into him. His body betrays him. The thought of FN watching, seeing him exposed and helpless, makes his cock pulse. But he can’t come now, he can’t come like this, not with the two of them gawking, enjoying the kriffing show together while he’s nothing more than a kriffing object.

(He knew, he knew kriffing well what he’d walked into when FN made that offer, when he felt the worm wriggling under his shoulder while FN fucked the girl’s cunt with his fingers and she thought about him, Hux, and he could tell from the way she felt it wasn’t tender or warm, it was vicious. And he still went ahead, came here and waited for them, waited for her, stayed after she pushed him away that first time.)

A second finger joins the first. He hates the noise he makes, whining and desperate, when her fingers brush his prostate. She takes it as encouragement, does it again, again till he cries out. He sounds like a cheap little slut, hungry for the little she’s willing to give him. And it’s true. If it wasn’t, he’d get up and go, but instead he’s kneeling here, his ears roaring at the thought of the two of them getting off on this.

The girl pulls away all of a sudden and he gasps at her absence. She leans across him, her breasts heavy and soft against his spine and the sensation makes his cock pulse again; he’s already leaking pre-come. He’s not going to last this one. It’s satisfaction, cheap and second-rate, or the tattered remains of his dignity, meticulously shredded past recognition by her.

She squeezes his shoulder. Her mouth is hot by his ear. He bites his lip to keep himself from moaning at her warm breath ghosting along his skin.

“You have to loosen up,” she says in a low, quiet voice. “Relax, Hux.”

“I’m fine,” he tells the carpet. “Perfectly fine.”

She makes a frustrated noise against his neck. He can feel it too: the angry little push inside, playground frustration shaped.

“I’m not going to,” she starts. Tries again: “It’s not —  _that_.”

“Isn’t it?” he asks her, half a laugh escaping him, dry and painful. “I can feel it when you —”

Her hands move, firm and determined along his shoulders, as though her touch is a substitute for everything else.

“Not everything in the galaxy works like the First Order,” she says in his ear, after several beats.

His fingers dig into the carpet. The least she could do is give him some kriffing credit and admit when she brushed past him into the room, she knew exactly what she was doing and it wasn’t kriffing charity.

She rubs her cheek against his neck. Warmth floods him, a weak and horrible fluttering thing that travels down his neck and settles in the pit of his stomach. The pushing is no longer angry and childish, it’s soft and it sets every nerve screaming danger. It takes precisely five long strides to the ‘fresher, which he counted in case of emergency: in dire need of escape it helps to have three different exit routes and the suite bedroom door is six instead of five strides away. Rose is smaller than he is, prone to fair play and giving unsalvageable junk second chances — why else stay and touch him, as if trying again might spawn all the missing pieces: the sensuality, the tenderness, the fierce concentration that knits her brow when she kisses FN. FN is an unknown quantity but FN is as small and selfish as he is. FN is the one who found him, told him exactly how it was, stripped of all the niceties:  _if you care for her_. An afterthought, hastily added: you’ll get some sleep.

_When she’s with you she’s thinking of me and when she’s with me, the parasite’s thinking of you_.

Not thinking, FN. Pure biology: one parasite calls to another, searching for ways to fester, infect and reproduce itself infinitely. It just so happens in this case, this moment, all the infinite possibilities and all the infinite possible vectors intersected to yield two human carriers on two ends of the galaxy, tenuously connected by the flash of recognition which occurred at the point of bodily contact: his finger under her chin, her teeth sinking into his finger. None of the other baggage matters: history, war, the galaxy, the sudden impulse to taunt her, her deep rage and desire to  _hurt_. The arithmetic of human relationships simply don’t figure in the primordial limbic systems of parasites.

( _Not a parasite_ : a declaration by one of Snoke’s purple-hooded lackeys.  _The Force_.)

So, arbitrary probability and pure biological instinct. Not destiny, not thinking, certainly no consideration for the unfortunate tertiary effects of human nature: emotion, feeling, obsessions, preoccupations.

( _You care for her_. FN’s eyes: dark and certain, unquestioning.)

Her hand moves lower down his spine in soothing movements.

“Are you —” she asks him softly.

“Be gentle,” he tells her. “Mustn’t blow my cover.”

She kisses the nape of his neck. The fragile membrane that lies between her and him, that pushes and moves with her rages and her stubbornness — and now, the slow deliberate warmth — collapses.

Something hard and blunt probes at his entrance. He squeezes his eyes shut and braces himself. Rose moves slowly, but the stretch and burn still makes his eyes water. His lungs seize up and he gasps desperately as she puts a hand on his spine and shoves in fully and it kriffing hurts and he wants it  _more_ , till white noise drowns him completely.

She adjusts herself and he whines as she hits his prostate at the perfect kriffing angle. Her hands settle on his hips and another pair of hands, also warm and callused, smooth his hair — FN is combing his fingers through his hair and when he turns his head to look, FN kisses him with a lazy firmness, then presses his mouth to his shoulder, to his spine, luxuriant and slow, that same self-assured confidence that leaves him breathless and the room feeling three degrees warmer than it was half-a-second ago.

Rose thrusts hard into him. He yelps at the searing pain which shouldn’t feel this way, but it’s good, so good, like the endorphin high at the end of a brutal, gruelling fight under the blistering desert sun, with every muscle in his body burning and on fire — only better, infinitely better and with no dying boys, no cheering crowd and no reluctantly approving father. Just him, her and FN watching as she takes him apart piece by piece. She thrusts again and his cock pulses hard. Kriff. He can’t come like this, two thrusts in like an over-eager teenage boy though pfask knows he feels like one: dizzy and breathless, whimpering and moaning as she yanks his hair and as her hips slam into his — he can feel the warmth from her thighs, her skin slick and sweaty against his and it’s too much, but he wants more,  _more_ ,  _everything_ she could ever give him.

A hand grasps his cock. A callused thumb traces the head and Hux’s vision blanks for a moment. The choked, hungry noise is him, he realizes, not a foreign body. FN’s mouth curves in a smile against his back. His cock is enveloped in the warmth of FN’s hand and he strokes as Rose thrusts fully into him. It’s too much: there’s stars floating across his vision and when he squeezes his eyes shut he can feel, in excruciating minutiae, the river of Rose’s thoughts scraping against his skin:  _you can’t forgive him, he’s all bad, he deserves it all, he’s just a man_ , on loop — him baring his teeth and staggering to his feet and then —  _wrong_ and then  _what kind of father_.

In the burning desert: instead of turning and running, instead of him pushing till the sky and sand collapsed in on itself, Rose in tattered overalls and her wrist bent strangely out of shape and bleeding at her side, stares and stares and touches the back of his hand with hers, till burning plasma and the desert sun swallows the sky and the sand, and the burning that sticks to the skin, sun and light devours him whole.

Hux collapses face-down on the carpet, out of breath and an unfortunate, warm wetness on his cheeks.

* * *

He’s already got his robes back on, wrapped tightly around him, when she returns with a damp washcloth for him. His bare calves look strange, out of place against the prudish and austere lines — like a kriffing uniform, though she’d fingered it earlier, savouring the texture of the soft terrycloth, to know it wasn’t the robes fault at all — and the way he’s standing straight-backed by the window. Only a minute ago he was lying on the floor and if you looked closer, was trembling, and now he’s back to being cool and glacial. Good old General kriffing Hux.

(Finn took one look at him and bolted. She couldn’t blame him. He’d expected a bloodbath or at least some kind of fight he’d have to break up. Must have been funny, seeing his commanding officer lying on the carpet and in the middle of a maybe-breakdown. Not something you think about everyday.

“Besides,” Finn told her, “Suite like this? Has to have one of those fancy aqualeisure things.”

She couldn’t hold it against him. All those years of terror: he deserved it. Something nice. Something she didn’t have to be a killjoy on.)

She nudges the strap-on lying discarded on the floor with her foot. Finn had questions about it too: why and who and how and where in nine hells did anyone get any time for messing around, which was when she’d looked him in the eye and asked him what the hell he thought it was they were doing. She couldn’t be mad. He gave her that same charming, naive and sheepish smile like the one he’d given her when she pointed out a thief wouldn’t be burgling his own yacht now would he.

Not exactly what she’d expected after a high like that.

“I found a cloth,” she tells Hux. His hair is still stuck to the back of his neck, drying in awkward shapes. She can’t see his face, but she can imagine the mess: come drying, half in his hair, half caking his face. “Here.”

“We lost at Ord Cantrell,” he tells the window.

Rose scrapes the side of her thumb with the cloth. “I know.”

“I was there,” Hux says. He turns to face her. His eyes are suspiciously red-rimmed and it makes her squirm, makes her want to look elsewhere, anywhere but at him. “I was at Bestine too.”

She holds the cloth out, but Hux motions it away impatiently, stuck on this new line of thought.

“And you lost,” she says. She reaches up and dabs gently at his hair. “At both of them. And at Crait. And at D’Qar. A whole dreadnaught against one starfighter and six bombers. You guys have been on a losing streak for a long time.”

A muscle in his jaw twitches. “I wouldn’t have lost. Otherwise.”

“I don’t know,” she replies. His eyes flutter shut as she wipes at his forehead. Her stomach flutters and it leaves her feeling sick, nauseous. “Didn’t take much to cost you Crait.”

“We would have won if not for —”

Annoyance surges through her. “If not for  _what_ , Hux?”

“If it wasn’t for Ren’s idiocy,” he says, “you’d be salt dust.”

Her voice trembles when she replies and she kriffing hates it: “I bet you’d enjoy watching, stuck up in your stupid shuttle where you couldn’t be harmed.”

This time, the fury that courses through her isn’t hers.

“Maybe I would’ve,” he retorts. He exhales in frustration. “This is besides the point.”

She puts the cloth in his hand. “You brought it up, Hux. Sorry I can’t feel the way you do about your stupid losses. Kind of comes with the package deal — resisting, having lost your home.”

Kind of hard to lie down and take it when the Force insists on tying her up to the guy who maybe, probably, definitely, wrecked her homeworld. And kriff, if he’d kept his hands to himself instead of touching what wasn’t his, instead of forcing her chin up so he could look her in the eye and jeer, there wouldn’t have been a transmission: force-waves connecting, forcing them together because a couple of parasites needed to reproduce.

She starts collecting her clothes. Stupid.  _Stupid_. Two wrongs don’t make a right, Paige used to say. She’d only half understood it when they joined the Resistance. The galaxy used to be a neatly divided equation back then. People who went around doing the hurting on one side, people who were hurt on the other. Throw in too many wrongs and the equation tilted horribly out of control and why,  _why_ in nine hells did she think him being nice for an hour a fortnight, or seeing that ugly moment in the desert was supposed to bring them one step closer to fixing things.

“Here,” he says, holding out her scarf.

She snatches it from him and winds it around her throat before she turns, hands on her hips.

“What I saw,” she says. “The desert —”

His expression grows shuttered, but she continues: “what the hell was that.”

“I wasn’t aware there was any difficulty understanding what happened there,” he says.

“I only wanted to understand,” she tells him. “Why — well why the Force decided to put us two together.”

He scoffs. “Pure science. One parasite seeks another for reproduction.”

“Charming.” She makes a face. “I can see why you have the rep you do.”

Hurt swells under her ribcage and then suddenly flattens. Hux just looks tired now. Pale and exhausted. Earlier, when she came back with the cloth, she’d felt as though she’d stepped through a hurricane of emotions straight into the eye of the storm, everything raging on the sides and him carefully containing it all so it wouldn’t touch her. Now, there’s a funny kind of absence. An airless, suffocating, deadened absence. Even sunny afternoons on D’Qar had a breeze, some kind of wind instead of a stultifying absence.

“You care for him,” he says, with a flat tight smile. “A lot.”

“Does it bother you?” It comes out pugilistic and he takes half a step back.

“No,” he says, a little too quickly. “I know — I mean I understand and I know — I can feel it when you — even on the other side of the galaxy.”

“The feelings —”

“And the other,” he says, folding his arms, “stuff.”

Rose makes an involuntary face.

“Which is,” Hux says hurriedly, “ what I was trying to say earlier, which is that this isn’t — it’s merely a parasite. It isn’t — FN told you, I suppose, that he asked.”

“Finn.”

There’s a sudden nervous edge to the nebulous energy he radiates. “What did he tell you?”

“He only told me he put it to you,” she replies. “And he said he thought you might agree.”

And she’d never asked why he thought that, though in retrospect she ought to have asked that first, because by then, Finn was whispering in her ear:  _you, me and Hux on his knees_.

“Well.” And now sudden, palpable relief. “There you are.”

“What?” She’s starting to get the idea this isn’t what he’d started out to say in the first place at all.

“I don’t think,” he continues slowly, “you have to — you can, you know, with him, without all this.”

“I don’t need your  _permission_ —”

Maybe they should have thought about this one through carefully. All of them: Finn, too large-hearted and too direct, Hux and all that horrible tangle of thorns and sudden hopefulness that hit her like a wave earlier today before twisting into fear, but she — she should have known better.

She knows kriffing well how he looks at her, how his eyes follow her around the warehouse floor when they make their trade, how he’s all nervous anticipation in the hours before they meet, how all of it’s underpinned by that weird sludgy feeling that’s been around for the past few weeks that makes her want to run in the opposite direction as fast as she can.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “That’s not what I said.”

“You just  _told_ me,” she begins.

“That’s not what I said,” he repeats, pathetically.

Rose stares at him. There’s not a lot she knows about Hux but what she does know is he never kriffing shuts up. Must have been one of those sanctimonious sleemos in school, always ready to tattle and always ready to sneer at some unfortunate kid who got in his way.

If she didn’t know better she’d say he was sick. He  _looks_ the part.

She’s starting to fit the pieces together and she’s not sure she likes the holopuzzle it’s turning out one bit.

“I can’t undo it,” he says, even more pathetically.

“So you lose.” Rose swallows. “Instead.”

He nods, slowly. “If you left with him —”

The sentence remains hanging and unfinished. Finn emerges from the ‘fresher fully dressed and he’s cheerful, far too cheerful: he only does this when he’s cornered and can’t fight his way out, which is when he turns to bluffing. And he’s good at it. Hux can’t tell. But she knows and she knows he’s all balled up and horrid, instead of that sanguine ease with which he’s befriended whatever’s left of the Resistance. Charmed them all the way he charmed her, though at least he looks at her differently than he does most of them. No, Finn’s hovering far too close to her elbow and she can’t feel him the same way she can Hux, but she can feel the nervous tension rolling off him in waves and — this whole thing was a kriffing mistake.

(Well, almost all of it. There’s some uses to Hux running his mouth all the time, as it turns out.)

Later, Finn turns to her when they’re curled up together on the tiny bunk on the shuttle back home and asks her what the hell that was all about, credit for your thoughts Rose, you’re quiet — and the trouble is, the trouble is —

(Hux, who looks drawn and pinched, as he follows them to the door like a lost stray.  _If you leave with him_ — and the heady anger that’s so easy to slip into around him almost seizes her at it, because what in nine hells was she going to do besides leave?

She tugs him down when it’s her turn to say goodbye and kisses him lightly and chastely, which is only fair when a guy’s spent fifteen minutes on his knees and his tongue up your cunt, and when he gives her that look, that frightening sludgy look that makes her insides twist up all funny she whispers:  _you can leave_.

And they both know this isn’t true: double agents never leave. But for a second.  _For a second_. He looks torn, then he’s back to being good old General Armitage Hux, though his hand around her wrist  _burns_.)

The trouble is she can’t explain to him how the trouble is she gets under Hux’s skin and the trouble with Hux and the trouble with crawling under his skin is, somewhere in the middle of it all she’s gone and done it again and against every inch of good sense and against every flame burning Sebris Gamma alive and he makes her insides flip-flop when they ought to be standing still.

“Thinking about the Force, Finn,” she tells him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she replies. “It’s a real sleemo.  _Him_ and the Force.”

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know Star Wars does not have an official technical name for an ice-pack? I didn't know this. Or maybe it exists and the wookieepedia is hiding it. If you do know, please tell me. 
> 
> Quadladunes are pale and sightless fish found in Hays Minor's underground lakes. They do not exist in the canon as is.
> 
> Part of this AU was inspired by Muse's incredibly cheesy and amazing bisexual lighting vampire song [Thought Contagion](https://youtu.be/QQ_3S-IQm38).


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